All time high?

$BTC set new records on many exchanges today, following a huge pump as the weekend drew to a close. This followed a drawdown just before Thanksgiving which made lots of people question whether we’d see new highs before the end of the year. $ETH participated in the pump as well, breaching $600 again.

My IRA holdings saw an absolute massive gain today, over 16%, close to three months salary. It’s amazing.

While CT was going nuts about “ATH”, I’m holding off on the celebrations because it didn’t hit on either Coinbase or Gemini. So my celebratory bottle of Glenfiddich will stay corked for now.


Work continues on the Ether Auction subgraph. I kept running into a bug using Hardhat, verified it using Ganache, and got a tip from someone on the Graph Protocol Discord. The bug was fixed in the most recent version of Hardhat, and I was able to get the subgraph working after I bumped the version in my repo.

I’ve now got the bare minimum I need to start putting together the front end. Step one, auction details, with the pot amount, start and end time. I need to figure out how to show the bids, and have the bid events update the auction entity. I may need to go back and update the contract to add a deposit pot event so that I have something to start with. Right now I’m using the auction_start event, which is triggered on the first bid, but that’s not going to work for the actual deployment. I want the functions to be available from the web front end.

So there’s lots of work to do.

Knowledge and specialization

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I’m trying to get back in the swing of things and stick to my habits. I’ve been terribly bad lately, staying up too late, not getting enough exercise, and spending too much money on beer. I’m sure a lot of it was exuberance with the bitcoin price action; I was way too excited about my prospects. This Thanksgiving pullback seems to have deflated my mania. I also deleted TradingView and my cointracking apps off of my phone.

I spent a lot of time playing Elite: Dangerous the past week after it was offered for free on Epic Games. It’s a massive timesuck. I played six hours after dinner on Thursday, trying to complete a mission that may have been bugged. It’s a great game, but I feel like I need to delete it from my PC. Otherwise I may wind up pulling out the Saitek flightstick and Oculus out of the closet. May as well buy some adult diapers while I’m at it.

Last night I spent the evening working on a bug fix pull request for a Hardhat issue that no one’s been working on. I ran into it while working on my Ether Auction unit tests, two other people seem to have discovered it as well, so I decided to take a look at it. It was actually pretty easy to fix. The Hardhat library explicitly imports many of the matchers in the Waffle library, these balance change functions were just left out. I tested one of them within my actual repo and it worked fine, but I’m not sure the most efficient way to design a unit test around every one of these functions. I may take another crack at it later.

I still get a kick contributing to projects, knowing that my contributions are forever going to be associated with the project history. Even if I’m just doing minor stuff like fixing a typo or adding a couple of imports to a file. It’s like every commit or PR gives me dev points, and each one still gives me a little dopamine hit.

There was a quote that’s had my attention recently: “the more knowledgeable you become, the more you tend to specialize.” I can’t recall the exact wording, but the gist is that as one gains knowledge in a field, the more one tends toward specialization in a particular niche. One the one hand, my professional knowledge has tended to spike toward a topic for a period of time before moving on in a different direction, Jack of all trades, Master of none, if you will. I might be overly harsh on myself. On the other hand there is a bit of immense freedom in this, that I’m not trapped into a particular niche. Still, it may be too much freedom, and has prevented me from truly mastering particular domains. I usually focus on what I need to get things done, then it’s on to the next thing.

When I was younger, I used to ready entire documentation manuals from front to back. I remember the large Windows 2000 Server Administrator guides, large 1700 page monstrosities that I would flip through with great curiosity. It got me pretty far in my career, and still serves me well as far as Windows server administration goes. I’m just trying hard to get away from that career.

Now that I’m in my forties, there’s a part of me that wonders whether I still have the capability to absorb information or pick up new skills like I used to. My brain is a sponge, but is it’s absorption rate still what it used to be? I don’t know whether it’s just doubt, impostor syndrome, or just too much time to think, but part of me is wondering whether I have what it takes to succeed in these endeavors that I’m undertaking.

As far as my day job goes, it seems that I’ve already made a semi-conscious effort to stop keeping up with the changes. There’s so much consolidation in the managed services space, with remote management and process service vendors merging left and right. New offerings are popping up all the time. Every few days Bossmang will send me an email about some online conference for this or that, Sonicwall’s new OS offering, say, and ask me if I’ve registered for it.

“Nope”. Aint gonna.

I’m simply focused on maintaining our existing customer networks. We haven’t had a new client in eighteen months. Right now I’m just focused on completing the Ether Auction, then I’ll have my first Ethereum project under my belt, and then I’ll feel comfortable calling myself an Ethereum developer, which will open a lot of doors. I know I can get the version done before a COVID vaccine is widely available, and then I should be able to go anywhere.

I’ve always loved casting a wide net, and going wherever my fancy took me. Unfortunately, this results in a bit of decision paralysis. I must get this from my mom. My dad called it “flightiness”, as she always had a new hobby, whether it be woodcrafts, painting, stained glass, or hiking. I tend to take after her in that respect, in what Missus calls my six-month projects.

I’m more focused on seeing things through to the end these days, but I’ve always lived by the maxim that works of art are never completed, merely abandoned. Maybe it’s a matter of specification, the difference between building to requirements versus a creative project based more on exploration.

Focusing on the process, rather than the outcome seem to help. Sit down, code, make progress toward the next thing. Resist the urge to start something new. Say “no”. Have constraints. Reduce the possible futures to the set of those where success (or at least completion) is inevitable. Collapse the superposition to a finite state, hit that commit button, deploy that contract, so you can say it.

“I’m done.”

Thanksgiving dip

Last night, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sent out this Tweetstorm about possibly AML/KYC regulations that might be rushed out by outgoing Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin. It’s worth a full read.

It seems like others have been expecting or anticipating this. Laura Shin just released an episode of Unchained earlier this month: Everything You Need to Know About the Looming Battle Over Privacy in Crypto

$BTC is dumping hard on the news, currently down under $17k.

I may have made a few sub-optimal mistakes.

First I cancelled my $GBTC sell order on Monday. The price blew by it on Wednesday and I felt like a genius, but then bottomed out yesterday. My worry was that any dip might be too brief for me to avoid settlement rules on my IRA account, which is prohibited from engaging in day-trading activities. If the price doesn’t recover before tomorrow, though, I’m looking at a five-digit down day, which won’t be fun.

I also make a small move with the last bit of fiat in my exchange account that was typical. Two days ago i had set a buy order based on a trend line I charted, at $18,450. Last night, before things got really crazy, I replaced the order with the new trend line, at $18,591. The price dipped, my order hit, and came back up. I felt good.

Then, a few hours later, the McDonalds memes started popping up on my Twitter feed, and I saw the price feed. Whomp whomp.

I’m seriously tempted to buy the dip, either by swapping my Yearn BUSD vault over to the WBTC one, but I’m just going to chill. Sticking to the plan is best here. When I get caught up in the market is when I make the worst mistakes. So I’m going to sit on my hands.

It is Thanksgiving, after all, so I’m going to spend the morning puttering around the house. We’re going to my mother in law’s for dinner, and Missus siblings and family will be there. We almost cancelled, due to COVID, but we figure since her mom watches the kids every Friday that we’re not taking that much of a risk. I’m conflicted.

I’m going to close out all of my TradingView and Twitter tabs, and try and try to be present with the family as best I can. I’ll try to remember how lucky we all are that no one has gotten sick and that we’ve got good jobs, a roof over our heads, and food on our tables. This year has actually been really good for us, all things considered, and I just want to stay humble and sober through today’s meal.

Finally, I really am thankful for the opportunity that Bitcoin, Ethereum and other projects has given me. It’s crazy to think how far things have progressed since I got involved four years ago. It’s funny for me to recall that I had set a goal to be working full-time in the crypto space by Thanksgiving 2018. We’re a bit behind schedule, but I’m okay with that. I work from home, I’ve got power and freedom at my job, and it provides just enough income for me to pay the bills and be comfortable financially.

And in spite of COVID, I’ve grown closer to my family, and managed to save enough of a financial cushion that I don’t have to worry about losing my job.

And thanks, Satoshi, whoever you are. Thanks to you I’ve stopped worrying about accumulating money to have things, and less concerned with being rich, and am instead focused on building wealth as a way to escape the trap of employment. My girls will have an opportunity to forge their own path to freedom, to know money as a tool for freedom, so that they can pursue their best lives.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Professional excellence

Today was pretty chill. I had my annual physical today, the girls were off school, and neither Missus or I were in the mood for much work, so we all took it easy today.

Public schools decided to take an early break today so I let the girls watch some TV this morning. I gave them a list of chores to do for more TV, but they decided not to do any of them, which was fine with me. I took them to the park for an hour this afternoon to run off some steam. I’m making them wear their masks while they play, but it’s probably not doing any good since they keep pulling them down. I’m trying.

My physical was uneventful, we mostly talked about our kids, fishing, and bitcoin, of course. Doc seems like someone I would hang out with, if I had friends of course. It would be a huge violation of ethics though. Que sera.

I didn’t have any messages or tickets in my inbox at work this morning, so I was planning on slacking off, but I surprised myself by answering a call for help on the national team tech help channel. There was an Exchange server error that was caused by a broken Active Directory/DNS issue. I spent an hour and a half troubleshooting and checking things, and finally got to what I thought was the fix. I still needed more information from the client, so I called them, waited an hour for them to call back. I ran the command, rebooted the server, and things were up and running.

The client asked me, “all you did was run that one command?”

“Yes,” I told them. He thanked me and I did my picture perfect support rep impression before signing off. I recalled a story that I had read some time ago that I often refer to after incidents like this, sometimes called The Handyman’s Invoice or The Boilermaker’s Story:

“There is an old story of a boilermaker who was hired to fix a huge steamship boiler system that was not working well.

After listening to the engineer’s description of the problems and asking a few questions, he went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the boiler and the hiss of the escaping steam for a few minutes, and felt some pipes with his hands. Then he hummed softly to himself, reached into his overalls and took out a small hammer, and tapped a bright red valve one time. Immediately, the entire system began working perfectly, and the boilermaker went home.

When the steamship owner received a bill for one thousand dollars, he became outraged and complained that the boilermaker had only been in the engine room for fifteen minutes and requested an itemized bill. So the boilermaker sent him a bill that reads as follows:
For tapping the valve: $.50
For knowing where to tap: $999.50
TOTAL: $1,000.00”

Day jobbing during a bull run

$BTC has broken $19k and it looks like today could be another good day. Hopefully not too good, cause I do have work to do. I’d like to get some work done on the front end for the Ether Auction, but I have a feeling Zombie, LLC is going to be sucking most of my attention this morning. I had several fires yesterday that still need cleaning up, and it’s hard to care in a bull market.

I had a heart to heart with Bossmang last week. I told him I wasn’t currently looking for another job, but also that he wasn’t paying me enough to put my kids back in day care. So I’m forced to rely on my coworkers to get stuff done onsite. An unfortunately for us, the only other person with any technical know-how is completely unreliable, unorganized, and incompetent. It’s harsh, but I’ve tried to work with this person, but they lack the basic skills one needs to succeed in this role, and I’ve given up several times. I’ve told Bossmang to let them go several times over the years, and despite the fact that Bossmang agrees with me, they’ve never done anything about it. It’s been going on for years, and dragging us down.

It may have been GE’s Jack Welsh that came up with the following saying that I’m paraphrasing: There are three ranks of employees, A’s, B’s, and C’s. A’s are the top performers, the ones who get things done, are self sufficient. B’s are the average employees, the ones who show promise and could become top performers with the proper mentoring. C’s are the employees who — how do we say, just aren’t right for the role. While it is possible for B’s to become A’s when put in the proper role and given the proper guidance, C’s will never become B’s. An my man is a C.

We had a morning call and talked about everything going on with the project, and I tried not to point a finger while making it perfectly clear who was responsible for the mess. My boss’s response was that we “needed more project management”. I’m so done.

I had several other problems that I continued to work through today, but they just seem so unimportant. I need to get out. It’s really hard to care bout my job when I’m watching my account balances earn two or three month’s salary in a day. It’s crazy.


I finally started working on the Ether Auction app. The contract is pretty much where I want it for this first run, but I have to figure out how to deploy an app for it. Create-eth-app comes with React out of the box, as well as a subgraph for TheGraph, which I’ve used once for PRIA, but this time I need to set up a local development node and figure out how to make all that work. I’ll get there, slowly but surely.

Boom time

Today was absolutely insane. There was some good news about another COVID vaccine which set the equities markets up today, and $ETH hit $600, which set the crypto markets roaring. It was amazing. I finished the day up eight percent, for my first five digit day, (and then some.)

The news behind $DPW was that they announced some partnerships with restaurants to provide electric vehicle charging stations. I’ve had a standing trigger since September to set a trailing stop next time it pumped past five dollars, and it triggered at 5.39, which cut me out of a couple hundred dollars to the close.

Overall, I’m glad to be out of this one. I had picked it after I misinterpreted some news about their involvement with bitcoin, and got caught up in that first big pump gap a week after I opened the position. By the time I hit my value averaging targets in the grey box, I was down, so I set the trigger, hoping that it would have another big spike that I could capitalize on. Turns out it worked, so yay me. I feel a lot better about the other, pure-crypto plays in my portfolio, and would rather put my focus there than worry about these guys in the future.

Ethereum was obviously the driver in today’s rally, and again, the fact that the mining companies are up even more shows me where I need to be focusing my cash. $RIOT and $MARA and the rest are doing really good.

Strangely, BTC has been pretty flat despite a big dip over the weekend, I think the fact that it’s basically back where it was Friday has proven really bullish for the market. In fact, $BTC was down from Friday’s levels, but $GBTC was up five percent.

I have actually been anticipating a BTC dip when we get near ATH levels, and I had calculated a GBTC price of 22.40 for a sell order. Today’s close set us at 22.15, so I’m thinking I may want to reconsider that order. If the premium keeps running up like today, we may hit it without any price movement by BTC, and I may get stuck holding the cash. I’m going to sleep on it and see what happens overnight.

In spite of today’s mind-blowing rally, I still managed to get pulled into four different fires at work. And it gave me a bit of solace while dealing with the bullshit, knowing that none of it mattered and that ultimately I didn’t have to put up with any of it if I didn’t want to. I got so much done today, I even managed to take the girls to the playground for an hour this afternoon, cooked lunch and dinner and did grocery shopping.

All in all, today kicked ass in more ways that one.

Long weekend

[This post contains referral links]

We took a road trip yesterday. My father in law bought several acres out in the country, about two and a half hours from where we live, out in the middle of nowhere. It’s got a large lake, and a wooded lot, and we wanted to get out for the day to check it out and get the kids out of the house. It was good for all of us.

There were Trump signs everywhere. I asked my FIL if he was going to build a house on the lot, and he said that no, the area was too “primitive” for him to build there. Most of the money had fled the area for brick houses on large farms, leaving mostly poor whites and minorities around. He had bought the lot mainly so that we would have a place to camp and fish.

We did a bit of the latter. The pond was stocked, but the few fish that we caught were too small to keep, so we threw them back. The girls played in the pond. It was a beautiful day, in the mid sixties, although the pond — spring fed — was quite crisp. We did some boating around the pond, walked around the woods for a bit, and ate and talked before heading back home. It was a lot of time in the car for a short visit, but it was worth it as a bit of a recon trip. I’m not sure we’ll go back to camp before next spring, but at least we know what we’re dealing with now.

Today I got a lot of work done on the deck, putting a couple finishing touches on it and cleaning up some of the mess that I’ve left. I’ve got a couple of railings left on the stairs and maybe a few more side pieces, then I’m pretty much done till this summer when it’ll be ready to stain. The hot tub is still dead though. I’ve got to call someone to come look at the pump; the motor is leaking now, and the repair cost will determine whether we fix it or haul it off. I’d rather get rid of it than spend another $600 repairing it, all told.

We watched Playing With Fire today, a documentary about the FIRE movement. Missus and Elder and I watched it this morning, I was surprised Elder paid so much attention to it. I think she gets it. Missus enjoyed it and I thought it was worth the five buck rental. It was good to help keep us focused on the prize.

I also signed up for Lolli today, after I found out that they work with my local grocery store. I’d actually be planning on using them to buy pet food a few weeks ago, but had been procrastinating. So I went ahead and signed up and used them today, earning about a buck and a half worth of bitcoin. Missus was actually impressed by the fact that I could use it and still earn points from my credit card, especially when I stopped to see if any of my cards were offering extra percentages for the store I was using. Alas, no. Still, it should be a good way to earn some extra BTC if I can stay disciplined and order most of my groceries online. It will do me good.

I’m actually considering switching my bank. The one I use has some issue with Plaid, which is used by BlockFi for ACH transfers. Basically, I have to transfer funds from my bank to Gemini, wait five days for it to clear, then send it to BlockFi. It’s too long. So I’m probably going to set up a new checking account with the same company we use for our joint account, and use that instead. I’ve got cash on hand to pay the mortgage and credit cards through the end of the year, and I don’t want to hassle with putting it in a Yearn vault, but BlockFi would be nice if I could just move in and out between my checking account when it’s time to pay the bill. I’m going to sleep on it.

Despite that, I’ve been slacking quite a bit lately, falling off my habits. Epic Games had Elite Dangerous as one of their freebies the other day, and I got sucked right into it the past few days. It looks like quite the time suck, from the looks of it, and I’ve already put in several hours of the past couple days. I’m almost tempted to pull out my VR headset and flight stick and yoke, but that would probably turn out bad for me. When I get obsessed with a video game — I’m looking at you, iRacing! — my life suffers in other respects.

The more time during the day that I spend on crypto, especially the smart contract programming that I’m doing for the Ether auction, the more I wind up taking a break during the evenings. I’ve been taking it real easy lately, especially the more BTC keeps making three year highs. I know Missus is excited about what’s happening, at least the fact that I’m excited about it, although I probably need to temper my expectations a bit. It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to run my mouth a bit much, and I don’t want to look the fool in a year if things haven’t manifested themselves the way I expect.

Still, we’re moving in the right direction, and from the looks of it we’re moving in the right direction. I just gotta keep stacking sats.

FIRE

The whiteboard on our fridge a white dry erase magnet, slightly bigger than a sheet of paper. On the top of it is written “FIRE by 2024”, along with the amount of student and mortgage debt that we currently have, along with the interest rates we’re paying on them. (The auto loan was erased last month.) Below that is the current price of BTC, along with an arrow pointing to the price it needs to be erase that debt completely, about $60,000.

Yesterday I decided to put a new number on that board, and calculated the value of my BTC in my cold wallet plus the Ethereum wallets I’m tracking in Zapper.fi

I don’t know if such a visible reminder is good for my mental health or not. I’m already obsessed with price action beyond what’s healthy, and I’m not sure if this is a good aspirational exercise I’m indulging in or compulsion.

Zombie, LLC, the walking dead that I call a day job, lost another client yesterday. This one was due to the client firm shuttering. It’s a small account, one that was more of a pain to deal with, but it had been steady recurring revenue lately, and didn’t require too much from me. When I got the call from the business manager, asking to cancel services, I could hear the depression in her voice. I’m sure she had been making several of those calls to other vendors and I managed to muster some sympathy in response. It was a small, family-run operation, and I didn’t ask for details. I assume it was a mixture of loss of business or the patriarch’s age, or desire to retire.

Side note, this guy actually wrote a book about how modern science is wrong about carbon dating and evolution, and how man co-existed with dinosaurs. He spent $15,000 to publish and market the book, but was always hard to convince when it came to capital outlays for the business. So it goes.

We seem to have reached some sort of equilibrium here at the house, with certain rooms falling into a sort of stable chaos between clutter and cleanliness. Missus made me bring out our Christmas tree last weekend as she wanted some cheer in the house. What we got instead is a leaning tree with one strand of lights thrown on it, and half the ornaments strewn around the living room floor for the past several days. The cats have taken to either chewing on the metal branches, or trying to climb or hunt from within them.

The kids have been somewhat more behaved lately. We seem to have reached a bit of understanding, they won’t do half of the things I ask them to do, and they won’t get to watch TV at all. We’ve settled into a sort of rhythm: we do our own things in the morning, chores (to an extent), breakfast, I have calls for work, they have their project du jour, lunch, and then schoolwork from noon till three.

I’ve been letting them use their laptops or tablets for Khans Academy in the AM if they want, but they don’t get any of their shows until after school. Elder is doing her third grade Zoom sessions, and I’ve got Younger doing IXL math and language arts. I’ll have her reading in no time. I’ve also bribed Elder with an ice cream party when she finishes the Khan Academy third grade math course.

Thanksgiving is next week, and Missus and I are still trying to figure out what to do about it. The girls go to her mother’s every Friday, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to avoid Thanksgiving at her house, even though the rest of the in-laws are there. I’ve got a lot of anxiety about it though. COVID cases seem to be spiking through the roof, and we’ve been lucky so far, the headlines about large Thanskgiving dinners and small Christmas funerals” seems to be stuck in my head. I think part of it is that I haven’t seen my mom since pre-COVID, and had been looking forward to seeing her during the season.

Missus’s father bought a tract of land a few weeks ago and has been steadily working to make it into a homestead. There’s a fully-stocked lake there, they caught over thirty fish in a couple of hours, so we’re going to take a day trip up there this weekend to check it out. It’s a three hour drive from here. My father and law has been busy putting some sheds up there for people to stay in, and making the path in more traversable with some gravel. I’m looking forward to it.

The rest of the house is awake, and I’ve got an hour until I need to be “at work”. I’m signed on and taking calls, but I really have no taste for it anymore. I’m fully immersed in smart contract development when I’m not looking at charts or on Twitter. There’s a lot to do.

Changing strategies

Another day, another 2020 ATH. $BTC broke $18K before I went to bed last night, and despite a $1000 drop that was quickly eaten up, we’re back at $18,200, ready to continue our journey.

I’ve been seeing something interesting play out with the Bitcoin related equities like $RIOT, $MARA, and $BTBT; they’ve been running faster than BTC and $GBTC. I’m not sure why this is, I guess investors think that they’re undervalued. The main question right now is whether I’m over-allocated in GBTC right now.

It’s 43%, so yea. I figured it was the best play on a BTC run, but with the others outperforming, I may need to reallocate. But I’m almost out of cash, so I’ll need to sell some to reallocate. My last GBTC purchase was on July 15, at 13.60. Current price is over $20, so I should probably sell enough to cover a week’s worth of my value averaging protocols for the big gainers. My two percent targets have increased, so I’ll have to update my value averaging script and make sure I have enough capital allocated to allow it to run.

Done. Now to see how it plays out.


Progress continues on the Ether Auction. I figured out some problems with the Hardhat/Waffle/Chai tests that were failing, and added some functionality to allow claiming the proceeds. Writing the tests out really forces one to clarify all the possibilities. I also found a big bug with the time lock parts of the contracts that were making them end seven seconds after they started, not seven days.

I’ve got some additional tests cases that I need to write to finish the auction contract itself, then I need to figure out how to deploy it to a test network and starting working on the UI. I’ve started going through the React course on FreeCodeCamp, and will deploy a create-eth-app once I have the contract deployed.

I want the website up and running before I deploy the first contract. I’m debating whether I need the autodeployer setup, or whether I just want to manage the first one manually as a test.

There’s also some interesting things with the Open Zeppelin upgradable contracts that I may want to add in before all is said and done. I’ve implemented a self destruct function that can be called three days after the auction ends, but using one of the proxy contracts to hold state might allow me to reset the auctions for the subsequent rounds.

We’ll see how things develop.

FIRE incoming

Woke up to $BTC over $17k.

40 days, 60%.

I’ve completely obsessed lately, keeping TradingView and my IRA up on my laptop while I’m working on my day job, which has been demoted to just a single screen on my dual monitor setup. I check Zapper.Fi daily, and am on Twitter constantly during the day.

I’m still doing my job, taking care of anything urgent or important, delegating as much as I can. Ultimately, nothing is as important as what’s going on in the markets, so I’m constantly reading and trying to figure out what the long term plan is going to be.

This Tweetstorm has a couple good points. One I’ve been thinking about and seen a few times before is that this isn’t going to be like the last couple cycles, with a blow-off top and an eighty percent drawdown. My plan during the past few months was that I would sell a portion of my holdings off and save it for a drawdown. But what if there’s not a drawdown?

My target is dynamic, it’s based off the moving average at the last top, about 3.6x the 200 day moving average. That equates to a price of $39,000. The longer we take to get there, the higher the price will be, so we might now have a huge runup like we saw before. Since we’re seeing institutional players in the market now, they’re more patient, will move slower, and price action might instead be a slow, steady grind up and up.

Of course, once we see $20k I expect it will be all over the news, possibly triggering another wave of retail FOMO. I’m not sure that it will have as much effect on the market since the market cap is actually a higher due to the block rewards emitted over the last few years. I’m probably completely wrong about this.

There’s also a chance that we’re moving into the next phase in bitcoin adoption: HODL FOMO.

If accurate, it would reduce the chances of a big drawdown, furthering the need to hold on. Still, I expect some sort of pullback. Many in CT are warning that this run up is happening too fast, and are hoping for a bit of a pause here now that we’re at $17,600. Better to let the market take it’s time than have a blow off top later. Still, I’d imagine some sort of resistance at $20k, so I’ve put in a limit order on my recent $GBTC entry that I hope will translate to the $19,800 level. If it hits, I’m hoping to to have another entry before we blast off, otherwise I’ll hold the funds to deploy elsewhere.

Where? Well I have noticed today that many of the crypto industry tickers had double the gains that $GBTC did:

I’ve got some value averaging protocols engaged for several firms, and I’m low on cash, so I’ll either need to liquidate some GBTC to free up some capital, or stop the protocol. I’ve set an expiry on the GBTC sale for Thanksgiving. Hopefully we’ll blow right past $20k while the market is closed and I’ll be able to close my position without selling.

Overally, my IRA was up over 6% today, while the major indexes were down one percent. I nearly had a five-digit day. So close. My point is that it looks like things are moving according to plan. BTC is on a run up, and it seems like every day I’m a bit closer to my goal of financial independence.

On top of this, President-elect Biden signaled that he will absolve up to $70,000 in student debt for everyone, regardless of income. This will wipe by debt completely. There are questions about how fast this will happen. Apparently he can do it via executive order, so we’ll see. One thing is now clear, that I will be making the minimum payment on my loans, of which the first payment is due in January.

What an exciting time!